January 2000, Vol. 11, No. 1

No Y2 chaos

Newspapers -- and everybody else -- survive the rollover to 2000

Some newspapers served the staff champagne, some poured soda pop. But pretty universally, the U.S. newspaper industry toasted the Year 2000 as a non-event when midnight, Jan. 1, rolled around.

The Y2K problem, for those just coming out of a 36-month nap, was that computer programs written in the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s and even the ’90s -- striving to save precious space when memory was expensive and limited -- truncated the representation of a year from four digits down to two. This meant that if you added 1 to 99, as most programs do (whether we're talking applications or operating systems) to change the year, you'd get zero. And all good computers know that zero is less than anything else, which meant that those computers would assume the day following Dec. 31, 1999 would be Jan. 1, 1900.

As some wits pointed out, the Y2K problem is best illustrated in the moniker Y2K -- shortening the words "Year 2000" to the first letter of "year," the number two and the letter "K" representing "thousand."

Like our brethern in the daily newspaper business, we held open quiet a bit of space in this issue to cover the possible trials and tribulations of Y2K. And, like our siblings, we then had to fill.

Nonetheless, I found a half-dozen U.S. newspaper executives who were willing to Monday-morning-quarterback with me on the preparations and execution of Y2K plans throughout the country. Most believed that despite the lack of problems, we didn't over-prepare (in fact, most agreed that our over-preparation prevented problems).

There actually were glitches, though, and I monitored the IFRA Early Warning System e-mail list and have transcribed the most interesting of the gaffes.

Also inside, we have a more usual menu of fare: